The late Raúl Ruiz's penultimate film adapts the 19th-century Portuguese novel of the title into a four-hour palimpsest of interlocking narratives. Pedro, a ward in an orphanage, begs the priest in charge to tell him about his parents. So the priest relates a story that spins off into other stories from the points of view of the characters in the first story, and so on, all drawing toward a unity that just eludes comprehension. Ruiz's gorgeous visuals evoke the heightened reality of a visionary dream.

Review: Irene in Time Luckless in love, Irene (Tanna Frederick) wants to "find a guy like my daddy." Her father, she says (over and over and over), "was really magical." Truth be told, her absent dad doesn't seem like that great a guy.

Review: The Slammin' Salmon Here's how the shit version of Waiting likely came to be: the Broken Lizard boys (David Heffernan directs) thought the concept of a boxing-champ-turned-Miami-restaurateur was funny, and they wrote and shot a major motion picture without bothering to design a plot.

Review: Invictus Poetry, muses Nelson Mandela (Morgan Freeman) in a reflective moment in Invictus , consists only of words, yet it can inspire perseverance and greatness beyond our own expectations of ourselves. Sport, similarly, consists of oversized, overpaid athletes pounding one another in simulated combat, but it's also a form of poetry.